Cop Says Washington Ordered Demotion

February 25, 1988|By William B. Crawford Jr.

A former top-ranking Chicago police officer who has filed a reverse-discrimination suit against former Mayor Harold Washington and top police officers told a federal jury Wednesday that in December, 1983, former Supt. Fred Rice called him into his office and told him he was being demoted on orders of ``the mayor`s office.``

William M. Maloney, 61, testified that after the Dec. 2, 1983, meeting in Rice`s office in Police Headquarters, 1121 S. State St., he was removed as director of a task force working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and reassigned to a district station as a sergeant.

During the meeting, Maloney said that Rice expressed regrets about the demotion, but told Maloney: ``It`s out of my hands. It`s coming right from the mayor`s office.``

Earlier, Maloney also testified that in 1968, he arrested former mayoral aide Clarence McClain after a teenage girl who had run away from home came to him in tears and said that McClain was forcing her to work as a prostitute on the West Side.

The inquiry was cut short after Judge Paul Plunkett sustained a defense attorney`s objection to the line of questioning.

Maloney, a 27-year veteran of the department before he resigned in 1984, was testifying in the $12 million reverse-discrimination suit that he and three other current or former ranking police officers filed against Washington, Rice and Edwin Bishop, now an assistant police superintendent.

The officers have charged that the defendants demoted them as part of an illegal plot to remove whites from ranking positions and replace them with blacks.

Maloney, Joseph C. Haughey, who still is a Chicago policeman, and former policemen Daniel P. O`Sullivan and Russell J. Luchtenburg charge that the plan was effected because they were white and because they supported former Mayor Jane Byrne against Washington in 1983.

When questioned by Edward Theobald, an attorney representing the officers, Maloney said that Rice began the meeting with the observation that

``sometimes being the superintendent is very distasteful, and this is one of those times.``

Maloney said that Rice then told him that he was being removed from the drug task force, adding, ``Hang in there. . . . Your people will get back in there.``

Maloney testified that at one point he told Rice, ``I will remember this day for the rest of my life.``